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25The Practical WorldIdealistic Studies 29 (1-2): 1-31. 1999.'Everything,' Kant remarks, 'gravitates ultimately towards the practical.' Judging by 'everything,' Kant is fixing on some feature of reality that he regards as invariant across times, places, and people. Judging by 'ultimately,' Kant believes that the feature yields itself up only to penetrative philosophical scrutiny. The remark is, I believe, a key to 'the basic problem confronting any reader of [Kant],' his idealism.
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47Doctrine and method in the philosophy of P. F. StrawsonPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 36 (3): 364-383. 1976.
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29Cartesian Substances as Modal TotalitiesDialogue 17 (2): 320-343. 1978.I. Analytic interpretation of Descartes' argument for a substantial distinction between mind and body works within a framework of assumptions – which is broadly Aristotelian – concerning the character of the Cartesian categories of substance, essence, and mode. Relying on a series of texts concerning the mind/body distinction which is usually passed over by interpreters, I will develop and draw out the implications of a different – a Platonic – view of these categories.
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32Kant’s ‘Critical’ RationalismIdealistic Studies 22 (2): 107-121. 1992.Matter, in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, plays a prototypical version of a rôle that recurs, refracted through the domestic preoccupations of each age, in metaphysical analyses of the constitution of the real. After identifying the rôle, I shall trace a developmental arc of philosophical treatment from Aristotle through the Cartesian period to Kant. The mature Kantian view of the rôle—the ‘critical’ view—is, I maintain, a reversion to the Aristotelian position. It is not however a simple reversion. I…Read more
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15Cartesian CertaintyIdealistic Studies 15 (3): 219-247. 1985.Whence the Cartesian’s advantage over competing world investigators? Descartes’s answer is that those of his persuasion do not proceed by “resting [their] reasons on any other principle than the infinite perfections of God”. The claim’s considerable opacity does not prevent it from letting this much light filter through: only Cartesian scientists operate on the right metaphysical basis.
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1Intellectual intuition and cognitive assimilabilityJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 10 (3): 153-163. 1979.
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16Cogitations (review)Review of Metaphysics 41 (2): 397-399. 1987.Though, in view of Descartes' challenge to the epistemological credentials of "reason" early in the Meditations, one expects him to resist the claim that the professedly invulnerable cogito argument works through the suppressed premise "Everything that thinks, exists," interpreters have been hard-pressed to convert comprendre here into pardonner. Loath to convict Descartes of confusing a psychological point about inferential process with a logical one about the conditions for validity, many are …Read more
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30Berkeley and CognitionPhilosophy 56 (216). 1981.In ‘Berkeley and God’, Jonathan Bennett diagnoses Berkeley's intermittent advocacy of the proposition that physical things ‘do sometimes exist when not perceived by any human spirit’ by pinning on him the invalid argument, vitiated by the ambiguity of ‘depend’, from all ideas depend on some spirit or other, via some sensible ideas do not depend on these spirits themselves, to some ideas depend on non-finite spirits
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15Abstraction and DeterminacyIdealistic Studies 12 (1): 14-34. 1982.1. The distinction between the functions of sense and intellect in cognition is first given its modern form by Kant. According to one influential commentator, Jonathan Bennett, “Kant’s breakthrough” in fact consists precisely in liberating himself from his predecessors’ misconceptions in this regard. It is true that the categorial duality of receptivity and spontaneity—of intuition and concept—is not to be found in the major classical writings prior to Kant. In its place, one encounters a relati…Read more
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11Descartes: the probable and the certainDistributed in the U.S.A. by Humanities Press. 1986.System of References To keep footnotes to a minimum, references to classical sources are incorporated into the body of the narrative, normally in the ...
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38The Prussian SphinxIdealistic Studies 25 (3): 255-280. 1995.Unhappy with a recent submission of mine, a referee for a journal specialising in the history of philosophy wagged a finger at what he or she called my ‘hermeneutical principles’. Though I am no stranger to the collegial woodshed, my initial reaction was nonetheless one of surprise. For had I then been asked about interpretive methodology I would have scoffed. The construer’s best course, I would have said, is to nose about the texts until some rough shape begins to emerge from the murk, and to …Read more
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10Cartesian UncertaintyGrazer Philosophische Studien 27 (1): 101-124. 1986.For placing the contrast of certainty and uncertainty at the philosophical center, Descartes is charged with Michael Dummett with mistakenly subordinating the study of language and meaning to epistemology. But Dummett's knowledge-theoretic reading of the certainty/uncertainty duality is as erroneous as the tradition it inherits is long. The Cartesian demand for certainty and critique of uncertainty in mature writings like the Meditations has a definite semantic character. Cartesian uncertainty, …Read more